


and the stars, too, they tell of spring

by leoperidot



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: (oh my god they were roommates), Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bisexual Suki (Avatar), Celestial Navigation, Coming Out, Complicated Feelings About Home, F/F, Fluff, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Girls in Love, Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, Stargazing, and i'd do it again bap bap, and the inherent homoeroticism thereof, and they were ROOMMATES, astronomy nerd yue, i wrote this instead of doing my physics homework, texan suki adjkhgf, they go to a historically women's college because rights, this wasn't supposed to be emotional but then i surprised myself, yue is central alaskan yup'ik
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:14:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26362468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leoperidot/pseuds/leoperidot
Summary: Yue pauses in the window, one sneakered foot perched on the sill, one pushing off her bed frame. Uncertainty hangs between her eyebrows. “Are you sure we’re allowed?”Suki grins. “I mean . . .”They’ve only known each other for thirty-six hours, but Suki is already very much used to Yue’s exasperated sighs. “Suki,” she whines.2 girls, chilling on a dorm roof, no feet apart 'cause they're pining
Relationships: Suki/Yue (Avatar)
Comments: 39
Kudos: 165





	and the stars, too, they tell of spring

**Author's Note:**

> hi first yueki fic i love them so much
> 
> i mentioned this in the tags but i tried writing yue as yup'ik and i made some references to yup'ik star navigation and my source on that is [here](https://csdt.org/culture/yupikstarnavigator/index.html) i am a White so if i got anything wrong or insensitive please tell me!!
> 
> title from "those you've known" from spring awakening LMFAO i was obsessed w spring awakening when i was like,, 13,,,, the lyrics are so. very. but they're good to pull quotes from

Yue pauses in the window, one sneakered foot perched on the sill, one pushing off her bed frame. Uncertainty hangs between her eyebrows. “Are you sure we’re allowed?”

Suki grins. “I mean . . .”

They’ve only known each other for thirty-six hours, but Suki is already very much used to Yue’s exasperated sighs. “Suki,” she whines.

“Look, I asked the RA when I was moving in, and she told me, like, she couldn’t say yes, but if two of us just _happened_ to fall out the window, the ledge would hold our weight.” She’s not even sure if Yue can see her waggle her eyebrows mischievously, in the dark, but she does anyway. “Come on,” she says, holding out a hand. “I’ll catch you.”

It’s not at all a matter of falling or catching, to be honest; the ledge is barely a few inches below the window, and stretches out a good four or five feet, solid and sure. 

Yue relents, taking Suki’s hand, slipping out the window, pausing a moment to close the screen behind her. “If even one mosquito gets in our room, it’s on sight,” she mutters.

Suki rolls her eyes. “You literally refused to hurt a fly.” Earlier that day, Yue begged Suki not to kill the enormous housefly menacing their room. (Suki was ready to kill it, but, acquiescing to Yue, she trapped it between a coffee cup and one of Yue’s books and leaned out the window to set it free.)

“Fuck mosquitoes,” Yue says. “Mosquitoes get no mercy.” She slides to a seat beside Suki as though she’s done it a thousand times. 

That’s the thing about Yue, Suki is learning: she concerns herself with rules, but when she breaks them, it’s with a practiced ease.

“They serve no ecological purpose,” she continues. “Absolutely none. Everyone thinks that, like, every single animal is an essential part of the food chain and, like, that’s true to an extent—but mosquitoes don’t do anything. They just spread disease. If mosquitoes disappeared tomorrow, there’d be no difference. We’d be better off. Fuck mosquitoes.”

“Didn’t realize you were so serious about this,” Suki says, more than a little impressed.

“I am,” Yue says. “I’m extremely serious.” She pairs this with leaning up to Suki with a very serious scowl on her face, and _holy shit_ she’s so close.

Suki’s heart starts doing double-time, and, try as she might, she can’t conjure up another smartass response.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, Yue leans away. Sits up, props her back against the brick facade. “How was tae kwon do?”

“Tough,” Suki answers honestly. “I’m so out of shape, I thought I was gonna puke.”

“But you didn’t,” Yue offers.

Suki gives a breath of a laugh. “I mean, yeah, but that’s not really my standard for, like, a good time.”

Yue giggles. Suki hates that word, hates its childishness and the dismissive way men say it about young women, but Yue—there isn’t any better word for her laugh. It sounds like bells, like twinkling, like all those cliches about a beautiful woman’s laughter that straight men spill so much ink over. Yue giggles, scrunches up her nose, smiles with her slightly-crooked teeth. It’s a giggle, and it’s beautiful.

There’s a lot of things Suki has learned about Yue, in thirty-six hours of sharing with her a room even smaller than Suki’s bedroom back home. She’s learned Yue doesn’t do anything without putting it in her Google Calendar. She’s learned Yue has an impressive collection of earrings, many of them homemade. (She made Suki a pair this morning, golden hoops with beads of magenta and jade green. Suki has worn them all day, only removing them reluctantly for tae kwon do.) Yue is a physics major, she doesn’t like chocolate, she’s not big into social media. Yue has a slight accent unlike any Suki’s heard before, her vowels roundish, her cadence sing-songy, and, the first day, she poked fun at Suki’s (very slight! hardly noticeable!) Texan accent. Yue misses home.

Suki may or may not have promised her best friend from back home that she was at least going to wait a few weeks before catching feelings. So much for that.

Yue tilts her head back to see the night sky. “It’s so clear tonight,” she whispers reverently. That’s another thing Suki’s learnt about Yue; she loves the night sky.

There are lanterns around the quad, a blue emergency light gleaming in the far corner, but Yue is illuminated most by the moon. It’s bright tonight, yellowy in the sky, just on the fuller side of half. Waning gibbous? Suki wonders, words half-remembered from elementary school science class. No, to wane is to decrease, to die. The moon is waxing.

Suki rests the top of her head against the brick facade. “It’s so pretty,” she tries, matching Yue’s reverent tone. That’s all the night sky has ever really been to Suki: a pretty background, interesting but never capturing her attention for very long. It’s opaque to her, an unknowable expanse of indistinguishable points of light; she’s tried to learn constellations, but whatever the ancients saw in the stars, her modern eyes can never grasp.

But Yue loves the night sky. 

“It looks different here,” Yue says then, still hushed, which might be from fear of being caught but, Suki conjectures, is more likely to be from awe. Mild conversation and the overused beat of some pop song float up from the quad, obscuring Yue’s softness enough that Suki tilts her head in order to hear the next part: “I guess I never thought about how that would change.”

Suki nods, then remembers it’s dark. “Yeah.” The sky must be different here than in Texas, too, but Suki doesn’t know it well enough to notice. 

They’re quiet, for a little. Yue takes her phone out of her pocket and holds it up to the sky. A matching map of stars glows on the screen.

“What’s it like up there?” Suki finds herself asking.

“In Alaska?” Yue shrugs. “I mean. Cold.”

Suki lets out a breath of laughter. “I figured that.”

“Yeah.” Yue giggles again, and Suki doesn’t pay attention to the crinkle of her nose or her single dimple, and Suki’s heart definitely doesn’t do a little jump inside her ribs. _Shit._

“Besides that,” Suki presses, not paying attention to her traitorous heart. “What’s Alaska like?”

It’s silent for a long time. Too long. Worries bubble in Suki’s mind: she’s pushed too hard, found a sore spot, come on too strong. A breeze chills them and Suki shivers, goosebumps prickling her upper arms. She tries looking up at the stars, but all she can find is the same mystifying connect-the-dots pattern as always.

She looks at Yue.

Her mouth is just barely ajar, dark brown hair spilling down her back. From this angle, in the indigo dark, Suki can’t hope to read her face for any expression at all.

Yue sighs then. Looks back to the earth, back to Suki. Shrugs. “I mean, I’ve never lived anywhere else.”

There’s something in her voice that makes Suki change the subject. Instead of letting Yue wallow, she points to a smattering of stars she thinks resembles the shape of a spoon. “Is that the Big Dipper?”

Yue titters with laughter. “Nope. There’s the Big Dipper.” She extends her hand carefully, glancing at Suki to see if she follows. Suki’s eyes roam the sky helplessly; all the stars blend into each other.

Yue reaches over, fits her hand atop Suki’s, and guides it until it’s pointing the right way.

Suki does not breathe.

“I . . . don’t know how I missed that,” Suki murmurs, once her eyes put the shape together.

Yue giggles again, and Suki thinks she might die of blushing.

“Tunturyuk,” Yue says. “That’s the Yup’ik name for it. My dad always told me, if you can find Tunturyuk, you can find your way home.” She pauses, a little smile tugging at her cheek. “There—you see that bright one,” Yue says, moving their clasped hands over, “near the moon, that’s Venus. Agesqurpak.” Yue brings Suki’s hand over to point above the treeline. “You can’t see it here, too much light pollution, but if it were clearer, you’d be able to see the Milky Way.”

“I thought we were in the Milky Way?” Suki’s suddenly doubting everything she thinks she remembers from elementary school science class.

“Yeah, we are. Everything you can see with the naked eye is in the Milky Way. But—so like, it’s shaped like a spiral, right?” She traces a spiral in the air with their clasped hands, but Suki can’t take her eyes off Yue’s face. “So we’re out here, on an arm of the spiral, and what people mean when they say you can see the Milky Way is actually that you’re looking in, towards the center.”

“Wow,” Suki breathes, and Yue grins, her nose scrunching up just a bit. Suki lowers their arms together, intertwining their fingers. “Tell me more about space.”

Yue obliges.

She talks for a long time and, if she’s honest, Suki doesn’t quite understand most of it. Yue tells her about meteor showers and dark spots and supernovae and galaxies and the sheer, overwhelming, mind-bending _size_ of it all, and it might go over Suki’s head, but Yue loves it so much that Suki loves hearing about it.

“We’re so small,” Yue says. “On the scale of the universe, we’re insignificant. Less than insignificant. Just some little tiny life-forms on a speck of dust. No matter what happens to us, all these stars will keep burning, the planets will keep spinning, the constellations will still trace those paths in the sky.” She gives a contented sigh. “I like thinking about that, when . . . when bad shit happens to me. The universe is still up there, still the same, and it always will be. I like that.”

At some point, Suki curled in closer, telling herself it was because she was cold. At some point, she dropped her head on Yue’s shoulder and closed her eyes. At some point, Yue leaned her head atop Suki’s. Suki doesn’t remember any of this happening, exactly, but she does know that she’s warm, and it’s late, and the sky is beautiful.

“We have to go up to the observatory sometime,” Yue murmurs, her fingers still tangled in Suki’s. Suki’s so close she can feel Yue’s vocal cords rumbling. “There’s only red lights up there, and red lights don’t impede your night vision . . . Of course, there’s so much light pollution here anyway, it hardly matters. You should see the sky back home. So many stars—”

“I want to go to Alaska,” Suki says. Which is not a desire she’s ever had before, but now if she doesn’t see the wide-open sky at some point in her life she thinks she might combust. She may be half-asleep, but she knows what she wants.

“I should take you sometime,” Yue says, but then Suki can feel her flinch. “Fuck. I’m sorry—”

“What?” Suki pushes herself back into a sitting position, groggily bewildered by how quickly the tide turned.

“Sorry, that was—We barely know each other, like—” 

“Dude, it’s fine.” Suki rubs sleep from her eyes. A particularly chill breeze chooses that exact moment to cut across them, and she gives an involuntary shiver.

“You’re cold.” Yue gets up awkwardly, lifts the window screen, reaches out a hand to help Suki up. “Let’s go inside. I’m tired.”

Suki doesn’t particularly want to, but she obliges anyway.

Yue snaps the screen and then the window shut behind them, then settles herself uneasily in her desk chair. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” Suki stands in front of the mirror with her makeup wipes.

“That flag.” Yue gestures at it. “Is it, like, a, um.” She swallows. “A pride flag?”

“Oh.” Suki glances up at the flag of pink, purple, and blue that she hung over her bed yesterday with painters’ tape, as if to verify, as if she’s not certain. Because how could Yue not realize? “Uh, yeah. I’m bi.” 

Yue swallows. “O-Oh.”

Suki’s stomach drops. Yue’s voice is—it’s weird. Unsettling. “What?” There is no way Suki misread the last hour or so _this_ badly. Unsure, disconcerting guilt twists itself into a hard knot below Suki’s heart. She scrubs hard at her eyeliner. What a way to ruin things with her brand-new roommate.

“No!” Yue exclaims, an answer to a question that wasn’t asked. “No, like, nothing—That’s cool. That’s really cool. I’m . . . I don’t know.” She sighs, then lets out a giggle, but it’s uncomfortable, nervous. “I feel like here, everyone’s, like—like, gay or bi or whatever.”

Suki crinkles her brow. “I mean, yeah, kinda.” She shrugs. “Sort of, you know, comes with the women’s college territory.”

Yue nods quickly, looking for all the world like a deer in headlights.

Silence, for a moment. Suki throws the spent makeup wipes away, feeling her earrings, Yue’s earrings, swing against her neck. She touches one slowly, starts pushing it out of her ear but then pushes it back, doesn’t yet. She releases her hair from its clip, letting the front strands fall down, framing her face. She looks in the mirror and Yue’s looking in it too.

Yue looks away too fast. “Sorry.”

“It’s all good.”

Silence. Again. Suki hates herself for—for whatever she did to make Yue so uncomfortable. 

There’s a sigh from behind her, and then a very small voice: “I only ever met one other gay person at home.” 

When Suki turns around, Yue’s looking at the floor, hugging one leg close to her body. 

“He—Well. Okay. It’s not like—It’s not like his family kicked him out, but he moved away. Of his own choice, but also . . .” She shakes her head. “I . . . It’s hard. At home, it’s like—everybody talks, everybody knows all your business, but nobody talks about that. Ever. And, it’s like, I wouldn’t even know how to tell them. My family. Or anyone. I—I just. . .” Her next words are so strangled, the sound barely makes it past her lips. “I didn’t know leaving would feel this bad.”

Suki perches on her bed. “But you’re not leaving forever. It’s just college.”

“I _know,_ but like . . .” She huffs out a frustrated breath. “It’s stupid.”

“No, it’s not.”

Yue smiles, wiping at one tear with the heel of her hand. “I mean, it is.” She sighs. “I just. I don’t know if I’m gonna _want_ to go back. I mean, no, I do want to. I could never imagine living anywhere else. But I don’t know—” 

The thought suddenly strikes Suki that she cannot keep sitting here and looking at that desolate look on Yue’s face for one second longer. “Come here,” Suki beckons, standing up and going to the window. “Come on.” 

Yue sniffles and pouts, but she unfolds herself from the chair and joins Suki in front of the window.

Suki wraps an arm around her, clasps one of Yue’s hands in hers, and points out what she’s about eighty-five percent certain is the Big Dipper. “There,” she says. “What—What was it called? Tunga—”

“Tunturyuk,” Yue says, her smile thin and watery, but there.

“Tunturyuk,” Suki repeats, and squeezes Yue closer. “There’s Tunturyuk. You can always find your way home.”

**Author's Note:**

> comments and kudos literally make my day, every single one
> 
> find me on tumblr [@katarahairloopies](katarahairloopies.tumblr.com)


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